Thursday, October 16, 2014

Community Acupuncture is an amazing way for acupuncturists to scale and provide quality healthcare to many people at the same time. In the past, scheduling patients for community acupuncture has been difficult, mainly because the scheduling applications on the market don't address the needs of distinguishing chairs and private rooms and allowing for overlapping appointments.

I'm excited to announce that Jasmine Practice Management can now schedule patients for both community acupuncture and private rooms.

The configuration for setting up community acupuncture scheduling is very simple. The first step is specifying the number of treatment chairs and the frequency to check for availability.

Next is to define the hours of operations for community acupuncture.

And lastly, defining a new service for community acupuncture.

Patients can now offer and schedule both Community and private room acupuncture from the same scheduling widget.

For the acupuncture community, having a modern solution tailored for the needs of acupuncturists will help move the profession forward in the ever changing healthcare landscape.

Monday, September 15, 2014

One of the many great things about being an acupuncture medical professional is the the ability to scale yourself and treat and help multiple people at the same time. For acupuncturists, the uniqueness of this trait presents a problem in finding an online patient scheduling service to fit this need. Many times, acupuncturists make unhealthy modifications and workarounds to existing online patient scheduling services to be able to manage multiple rooms.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Appointment scheduling is one of most important functions of an acupuncture practice. A practitioner needs to quickly and easily book appointments and move to the next important task at hand.

The initial calendar offering from Jasmine Practice Management was the default Salesforce calendar. While this was a great first start, we learned from customer feedback that it was insufficient. Based on feedback, some of the new changes include:

Display shorter time increments

The new calendar now shows in 15 minute increments instead of 30 minute increments. This provides easier viewing of appointments start and end times.

Easier appointment creation

Creating an appointment is now easier. The appointment creation dialog provides a quick patient lookup as well as having the Service more easily selectable.

Overlapping appointments

A unique and wonderful feature of an acupuncture practice is the ability to treat multiple individuals at the same time. This allows for providing medical care at scale. The Calendar+ allows for scheduling multiple overlapping appointments.

Drag and drop appointment rescheduling

The ability to easily reschedule appointments by drag and drop makes for a more efficient practice and better way of interacting with the Calendar.

As we move forward, we will continue to enhance the new Calendar+ to help acupuncturists with this crucial task in managing their practice and to look for ways to increase efficiency and productivity.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

As an acupuncture practitioner, the thought of paper work and documentation is dreadful and tedious. SOAP Notes are even more painful when you're recording the needle points used during a treatment. And to run a professional medical acupuncture practice and to adhere to health guidelines, taking proper notes is essential.

One of the main goals of Jasmine Practice Management is to make SOAP Note recording as accurate and simple as possible and to get acupuncturists back to treating patients. In our latest release we move closer to this goal with the ability to easily add needle points.

The new "Add Needle Points" button opens the Needle Point dialog. On the dialog, the practitioner selects the unilateral or bilateral insertion, so Right, Left or Bilateral. Next, the practitioner chooses from the 14 meridians (LU, LI, HT, SI, PC, SJ, GB, LV, UB, K, ST, SP, DU, REN) and the corresponding points are then available to be selected.

The results of the needle points selection is recorded in the SOAP Note in the Points & Methods field under the Needle Plan section.

Friday, July 18, 2014

The patients you've collected over the years are invaluable to you and your business. And one of the most difficult tasks when moving to a new system is the question of what to do with your existing patient data.

Many systems make data migration a pain. One of the reasons for this is to force vendor lock-in, which is to make customers dependent on the vendors services. Less innovative companies think this will prevent customers from switching to another service, however, the underlying message they are saying is that they're not confident in their own product. And holding your data hostage is their best line of defense.

One of the main features of Jasmine Practice Management is to easily export and import data in a "standard" format. And, "standard" format is important here because it allows you, the customer, to easily move your data from one system to another.

And this extends from one of our core beliefs which is "Your data belongs to you."

Recently, we've had the privilege of migrating users of Gingko ClientTracker and Office Ally Practice Mate to Jasmine Practice Management. The experience showed us the difficulty and hoops that users of other services go through to export their patient's data. In Jasmine Practice Management, as a user, you can export your patient data at anytime, no hoops required.

And the reverse is just as easy, data import in to Jasmine Practice Management is easy as 1, 2, 3...

Importing your data into Jasmine Practice Management is painless. You first start off by launching the wizard. Then choose the type of object, which could be a patient contact record, SOAP Notes, products and more.

You then choose to "Add new records" or "Update existing records" in Jasmine Practice Management.

And finally, choose the file type for import. The standard format is a CSV file, which is a Comma-Separated Values file type used often by spreadsheet programs like Excel.

Monday, June 2, 2014

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the launch of their openFDA program to make their large health data more accessible to the public. The implications for this type of access is huge. The ability for new and exciting applications to be developed off of this data will give acupuncture practitioners better information at their finger tips.

"Consider the 3 million plus reports of drug adverse reactions or medication errors submitted to FAERS, the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (previously AERS), since 2004."

Imagine not only having this data at your disposal, but also being able to cross reference this with herbal formulas and supplements. A practitioner will be better able to educate their patients about their health and ultimately, save lives.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Keeping detailed pulse and tongue diagnosis is a great way to keep a "pulse" on your patients' health. (Pun intended.) The good record keeping gives you a clear view into your patients' health history when you go back to review it with them.

In the days of paper and pencil, acupuncturists would make their own treatment note templates, often times borrowing from student clinics or more established acupuncturists. Now that we can harness the power of the Internet and a true SaaS platform in Salesforce, we have the opportunity to share, build and innovate the traditional acupuncturists' SOAP Note.

In this latest update to the SOAP Note, I'm excited to share that we've added the ability to track more advanced pulse and tongue diagnosis.

Pulse Diagnosis

For pulse diagnosis, you can now easily track all 3 positions, Cun, Guan, and Chi, in both left and right hands of the patient. And in addition, you can track the 3 levels, Superficial, Moderate, and Deep.

We've also added the ability to easily pick values for the pulse quality of your patient, so that it reduces the amount of typing a practitioner has to do.

Tongue Diagnosis

For tongue diagnosis, we saw an opportunity to take advantage of new technology like tablets to capture information about a patients' tongue. You can now take a picture of a patients' tongue and attach it to their SOAP Note, in addition to information such as the tongue shape & size, color, and coating.

In addition, we've provided default values for many of the fields to make note taking easy and quick.

I believe having quick and easy note taking is a vital part of running an efficient practice and will continue to invest and innovate the SOAP Notes in Jasmine Practice Management.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

As you may have heard, a critical security bug was discovered on April 7 called CVE-2014-0160 also called "Heartbleed." The bug is a vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, which is used to encrypt and secure the internet. Most people come into contact with OpenSSL through the green https icon in their browser which you see when you browse a secure website.

When you browse and use a website with the green https icon, all your communication between you and the server is encrypted, so sensitive information like usernames, passwords and patient information is safely transferred.

Jasmine Practice Management is built on top of 2 software stacks, Salesforce and Heroku. Salesforce is the application platform which the practitioner uses to take and store patient treatment notes. And, Heroku is the platform for integration with Google apps and the patient self scheduling widget, in addition to the Jasmine website.

Salesforce

Salesforce reports that they are NOT affected by the "Heartbleed" vulnerability, so we and you can be assured that your patient treatment notes are stored securely. Here is the official Salesforce statement:

On the Heroku side, which manages the Jasmine integrations and website, steps were taken to address the "Heartbleed" vulnerability. Heroku updated all their OpenSSL libraries, SSL Endpoints, and databases. Here is the official Heroku statement:

In turn, for Jasmine Practice Management, we've followed their recommendations and updated our passwords and SSL certificates.

Summary

While I'm confident, with the current knowledge we have of the situation, we have addressed the "Heartbleed" vulnerability, we continue to monitor the situation with our partners and application providers.

Thank you for your patience in this matter. As always feel free to reach out to me at contact@jasminepm.com.

Friday, March 28, 2014

One of the many strengths of Jasmine Practice Management is that she's built on top of the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com. Recently, Salesforce celebrated their 15 year anniversary and I want to take this opportunity to talk about why we chose the Force.com platform for Jasmine Practice Management.

Before we first conceived of Jasmine Practice Management, I worked at a company which provided a best in class software solution for non-profit companies to fundraise and manage donors and volunteers. The Force.com platform was the underlying infrastructure for this solution. In the time I worked with the Force.com platform, I was impressed with not only the innovative technology, but their great people and philanthropic mission at Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com is a publicly traded, global cloud computing company started by Marc Benioff, who is also the CEO. Marc started Salesforce.com in March 1999 in his rented San Francisco apartment with the mission as The End of Software® and changing how software brings value to users. Salesforce.com is best known for its customer relationship management or CRM product. And, they are currently ranked as the most innovative company in America by Forbes magazine.

At the heart of the Force.com platform is the Customer Relationship Management or CRM, which helps you manage the interactions with your customers. They provide a highly secure and reliable infrastructure that is HIPAA and HITECH compliant. In addition, many large hospitals and healthcare companies are built on the Force.com platform. You can read more about the use of the Force.com platform in healthcare here. http://www.salesforce.com/industries/healthcare

As I evaluated different technologies to build Jasmine Practice Management, the Force.com platform was and still is the best in class technology platform to build a best of breed, cloud based practice management solution for acupuncturists.

In the coming weeks, I will write more about how the Force.com platform and Jasmine Software will change and innovate the acupuncture profession and help acupuncturists manage a more efficient practice and provide value to your patients.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

All successful businesses form effective, efficient, and repeatable business processes. And as the business grows, these processes also need to be scalable. The difficulty is discovering these best practices requires a lot of trial and error and testing.

One of the advantages of using Jasmine Practice Management is that acupuncturists use a system which is crowd sourcing the best business processes from many acupuncturists and codifying them in a solution so you run a more efficient practice.

Our recent feature is the integration of Appointments and SOAP Notes, making it easier to create patient treatment notes at the time of a patient's visit.

Now, with one click, you are able to easily create a SOAP Note for your patients. If the appointment has not yet been associated with a contact record, you are presented with a popup to select a patient.

Once you select a patient, she will be associated with the appointment record and a new SOAP note is created and you are ready to take her treatment notes.

As always, we love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a line. You can reach us at contact@jasminepm.com.

Monday, March 3, 2014

As practitioners used the Jasmine Online Patient Scheduling widget, many acupuncturists told us that they needed more flexibility around defining their business hours and a better algorithm for determining availability times. With the latest code update, we've enhanced both of these areas to make it easier for both practitioners and patient to self schedule online.

Practitioners can now define business hours by day. For each day, a practitioner can set different start and end times for the particular day.

The algorithm to search for available appointment times was enhanced to look for times in 30 minutes increments. The result is providing patients with a larger array of times to choose from.

In addition to the enhancements above, additional benefits come from being nicely positioned to tackle the next set of challenges for acupuncturists which are multi room practices, community style acupuncture and multi practitioner practices.

We're excited about these new enhancements and hope you are too. As always, we love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a line. You can reach us at contact@jasminepm.com.

Monday, February 3, 2014

When we build new features into Jasmine Practice Management, we love hearing feedback and try to get to the essence of the needs and pain points of acupuncturists. We take special care in understanding the practitioners business process and flow so that we can streamline that process.

We've heard from many of our users and demo feedback that the ability to ease the creation of SOAP notes, add codes and generate Superbills would be very helpful.

In our latest release, we've added several ways to help you with your business process.

Easily add Diagnostic and Treatment Codes to SOAP Notes

Ability to clone SOAP Notes with Diagnostic and Treatment Codes

One click receipt creation from the SOAP Note

Read more about each new features.

Easily add Diagnostic and Treatment Codes to SOAP NotesWe have had feedback from our users that it makes more sense to configure the ICD codes and the CPT codes for each specific treatment. To accomplish this, we added the ability to configure these codes on SOAP Note (as our clients had been able to do on a Receipt). See the screen shot below:

Figure 1: Diagnostic and Treatment Codes on SOAP Note

Ability to clone SOAP Notes with Diagnostic and Treatment Codes

Since we have heard our clients are creating "template" SOAP notes, it makes sense that you will want to also configure the ICD and CPT codes as a part of the template. We updated the SOAP Note clone feature so clicking the "clone" button will create a new SOAP note with all the fields and any ICD and CPT codes.

One click receipt creation from the SOAP Note

We have added a button on the SOAP note which can create or update a Receipt. This is based on your feedback that SOAP notes and receipts should be linked. Any ICD and CPT codes which have been created on the SOAP note will be copied to the Receipt. See the screen shot below:

Figure 2: New Receipt button on SOAP Note

If you change these codes or the treatment information (price or quantity for a CPT code), the same button can be used to update the receipt. Here is the same section once a receipt has been created and is linked to the SOAP Note:

Figure 3: Update Receipt if SOAP Note changes

It is great to be able to release new features which come to us as feedback from our early adopters. We are grateful for their time and effort in helping us make something useful for the acupuncture community.

We are always open to questions and comments. Feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to us at contact@jasminepm.com

Friday, January 31, 2014

And to celebrate the new year and new beginnings, today, we are happy to announce the Jasmine Open Beta. We've come a long way in building the product to help acupuncturists like yourself manage a more efficient practice. And we could not have done it without you, the acupuncture community who have embraced us and have guided us with feedback and encouragement.

With Jasmine Practice Management and the new year, you can transition to the digital world to keep track of patients details, SOAP notes, generating Superbills and appointment scheduling along with Google calendar syncing and so much more!

Monday, January 20, 2014

We hear from many acupuncturists that they use Google calendar to keep track of patient appointments. Google calendar is a great tool for managing your personal and business lives in one place. In addition, most phones have the ability for you to sync with Google calendar so you can be reminded of appointments while you're on the go!

In Jasmine Practice Management, we now have 2-way Google calendar sync. When you create a patient appointment in Jasmine Practice Management, the appointment will show up on your Google calendar. And, when you create an event in Google calendar, the event will show up in Jasmine Practice Management.

In addition, when you create a Google event with a guest and we find the patient's email within Jasmine Practice Management, we will automatically attach the appointment to the patient's record, so you have accurate records of your patient's appointments.

As always, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a line. You can reach us at contact@jasminepm.com.